It's been argued that American writers don't know how to tell a happy love story. Instead of ending a tale with the payoff of a wedding, or writing about the joys of family life, they obsess over loneliness, death, and escape from civilization. In this class, we will collectively test and revamp that thesis, constructing an informal history of love over a century of American imaginings. What is the symbolic value of marriage in a country with a stated aim to achieve a more perfect union (a question we'll see played out in the film )? How do some of our great authors try to convey the nature of desire? What, for instance, makes Daisy in The Great Gatsby, or Poe's dark-eyed heroine in "Ligeia," so alluring? And we'll consider extramarital forms of attachment, from the ties that bind "frenemies" (like Chillingworth and Dimmesdale in The Scarlet Letter) to the tender care people lavish on the things they collect (as in Henry James's The Spoils of Poynton).